A student group from the Colorado Mesa University ACM club has formed! We’re about four strong, and this is our first game jam ever.

Tools:XNA/Monogame(probably)
sfxr
Wolfram Tones (http://tones.wolfram.com/generate/ if you were curious)
Gimp
Sprite Generator(http://tmtg.net/ludumdare/spritegen/ again, if you were curious)
and probably others, but that’s what we’ve decided for sure so far.

We’re excited to try this out and participate in our first Ludum Dare Jam!

Group:
Firestorm713
The Grand Mugwump
Cupcake
Baldr_Golem

Finished with little time to spare!

And with a bunch of stuff not done.Our biggest problem was thinking that we could get Silverlight and XNA to play nice without visual studio pro. Now we know. At any rate, We ended up using unity, and I wish we(I) hadn’t wasted a day trying to fight with XNA. Oh well. Next time, I use unity.
This wasn’t only our first time competing in Ludum Dare, this was the first project the three of us did together overall. It was a learning experience, and I think we will do better next April!
I’ll be posting my post-mortem in a few hours, after I’ve had some time to sleep.
–Firestorm713

So yeah. Here’s what went right and wrong about the project. The biggest event overall was when I ultimately ditched XNA for unity due to compatibility problems. Specifically, we wanted to compile to web, as we felt the most people would prefer to not have to download a thing. We probably could have gotten away with XNA, but I don’t think our game would have turned out as well in general. There were a bunch of features that we probably could have implemented had we started with Unity, but oh well. We completed our game, and that’s good enough for me, at least for the first time. next time, we’ll be in it to win it!

Right:
We managed to get a working game, and it was actually quite a bit of fun.All of our 2d art ended up working really well as reference when we moved to 3d.
The sound came out great. The music was really strong, as was most of the sound effects.

Wrong:We shouldn’t have changed engines halfway through, that was a big mistake.
We should have spent more time before the competition learning how the engine(either one) works.
Flash somehow had a weird bug which wouldn’t flag certain booleans, causing some strange crashes.

Features we wanted to implement:The ability to tractor civilian ships to your base for money
The ability to upgrade your ship with extra turrets
The ability to destroy military bases for reputation, and civilian bases for money
Reputation was supposed to get you more minions, which would repair your base
The military was going to be able to destroy your base.
There was supposed to be a really nice starfield effect, which never happened, sadly.

I was going to be working on a robot, but now I’m making Video Games! 😀

platform: Unity 2D (or maybe XNA/Monogame and JSIL)
editor: Sublime Text 3, Monodevelop
Music/sound: sfxr and Soundation, possibly FL Studio
Graphics: Inkscape and GIMP

Last year I did the jam, this year, I’m going all out. I might try to get screen recording and whatnot going this year as well.

What I remember from last year:

• Fewer than three mechanics(I tried to do more)
• Feedback is important (specifically, from the game to the player)
• Nothing matters more than mechanics
• Gameplay, Gameover, Title, in that order.
• Specifically, get your simplest gameplay element working(usually movement), then get a lose/win condition then work on everything else.
• Have Fun and don’t stress
• Sleep

This was probably the theme I wanted the least, but I’m going to run with it.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/116281983/LudumDare28/LudumDare28.html

Initial builds are up, but I’m nowhere near ready to actually submit. Need a title screen and an actual life system. I say life and not lives because, well, “You only get one”

You’d think I’d learn by now, but I’m in for another attempt at Ludum Dare. Last year ended in spectacular failure due to lack of preparation and getting locked out of my lab at 3AM, so hopefully this year will go better. I’m doing the Jam as a confidence builder. I’m also slightly insane, as it’s the weekend before Finals, but whatever. I’m already insane enough by doing Ludum Dare.

Tools
Engine: Unity 3D
Art: GIMP
Sound: bfxr
Music: LMMS or FL Studio Trial

Here’s to another good jam!

I’m more or less in sort of?

Going to do the Jam again this year, and actually attempt to finish, since I lost the last three times I’ve tried to do the jam.

My plan, regardless of the theme is to make a simple two player Board Game in Unity. We’ll see what I actually end up getting done.

I’m doing something like this for work right now, and so having the game jam time to flex my creativity muscles will help me understand a few things that I’ve been confused about, and help me work out some kinks in our code, by applying it to something completely unrelated.

If I can’t figure out anything for the theme, I’ll probably end up just blasting through as much code as I can on my work project. We’ll have to see.